... the Workers Party and the Progressive Unionist Party in Northern Ireland Roger Cottrell Before he went on the run, in the wake of Ernie Elliot's murder in 1972, former British soldier and UDA member David Fogel gave an interview to the London Times.(1 ) In it he denounced sectarianism and said that he hoped that one day 'the Official IRA and the UDA would work together, because both organisations have the working people at heart' (Boulton, 1974; 182-183). Sadly, for all that Glen Barr's founding of the New Ulster Political Research Group in November 1974 (in the aftermath of the UWC Strike) represented a genuine attempt to find a working class ...

... October 1989 Last | Contents | Next Issue 18 The SAS, their early days in Ireland and the Wilson Plot AMBUSH: the war between the SAS and the IRA James Adams, Robin Morgan and Anthony Bambridge (Pan, London 1988, 200 pp 3.99) Alexander Platow Following the Gibralter shootings, the Sunday Times 'Insight' team lead the campaign to discredit eyewitness accounts of how the SAS killed the IRA unit.(1 ) Ambush is their account of the shootings and SAS operations in Northern Ireland, and claims to be the 'first detailed account of the truth behind the headlines. ' In his review of the Gibraltar section of the book Paul Foot described the ...

... writes: 'To republicans and nationalists it was clear evidence of collusion between members of the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries' (emphasis added). Not so: it was clear evidence to anyone. Taylor describes how, using state intelligence, the UDA's 'targeting' of the Nationalist community improved: fewer Catholics were murdered at random, more IRA members. Another way of describing these events would be this: the British Army was running the UDA's assassins against the IRA - and successfully, too. In effect, in the late 1980s the British state decided that while they could not kill the IRA openly (the late Alan Clark MP's solution: let the SAS loose), ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 24) December 1992 Last | Contents | Next Issue 24 Big Boys Rules: The Secret Struggle against the IRA Mark Urban Faber and Faber, London, 1992, 14.99 The Red Hand: Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland Steve Bruce Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992: 7.99 In recent months there has been the remarkable sight of the weight of the British state descending upon Channel 4 TV and the production company Box in retaliation for the Box/Channel 4 programme alleging military and intelligence collaboration between the British state and the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. (See The Independent 29 ...

... Gill and Macmillan, 2006, 22.99, h/b Out of the blue and into the black Roger Cottrell When Fred Holroyd first made his disclosures regarding the activities of SAS Captain Robert Nairac to Duncan Campbell of The New Statesman in 1984, they were credible because Holroyd was a loyal Army Intelligence Captain with absolutely no sympathies for IRA terrorism. (1 ) Despite efforts on the part of Martin Dillon in The Dirty War (Hutchinson, 1989) to smear Holroyd as an embittered ex-soldier motivated purely by vengeance, Holroyd's claims have also been vindicated. (2 ) Not only did Nairac execute the IRA terrorist John Francis Green, in Monahan, during the ...

... of the Irish Sea, and this is shown in the wealth of footnotes that document his research. Equally I couldn't detect much in the way of bias (that is upfront partisanship, although such reliance and focus on governments and their actions produces its own bias, but that's a different argument). McMahon is as scathing about the pointless IRA actions in the 1930s and 1940s as he is about the British government's (and many of its intelligence operatives') apparent inability to work outside a very racist and colonialist mindset when dealing with the 'Irish' problem. He also gets inside de Valera's almost cynical use of the republican threat which enabled him to wring concessions out of the ...

... internees .. . Army intelligence had falsified figures in an attempt to change Rees' policy of phasing out internment." (145) Joe Haines, Wilson's press secretary, said of this incident: "We felt that elements in the Army were working against us". (146) Reports of Wilson's planned peace talks with the Provisional IRA in December/January 1975 were leaked to the Northern Ireland Office to create a rift between Rees (who did not know about them) and Wilson. Joe Haines again: "Dr. O'Connel (who had been the go-between the Provos and the Government) then discovered that his second visit to London (by-passing ...

... up till then, working only abroad. The UK was MI5's bureaucratic 'territory'. Maurice Oldfield, MI6 head at the time, is said to have opposed the move. (Verrier, 1983 p 302) Once in Northern Ireland, MI6 began doing what MI6 does. It recruited agents, tried to create a political alternative to the IRA - the Social Democratic and Labour Party (and, perhaps, the Alliance Party) (Verrier, ibid p 286) - and began trying to talk to the IRA. MI5, which began operating in Northern Ireland with the advent of the IRA bombing campaign on mainland Britain, saw MI6 not as an ally but as an opponent ...

... Threats for Old?Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War Larry O'Hara Phoenix Press, London, 1994, 6 (p and p included) from BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX; cheques payable to Larry O'Hara. Since 1945 MI5 has had three main domestic targets: Soviet bloc espionage, the British Left and the IRA. With the Soviet target gone, and the British Left of no consequence for the forseeable future, all that remains of the old agenda is the IRA. As MI5 Director-General Rimington acknowledged in the agency's glossy brochure put out last year, about half of MI5's budget is currently devoted to the IRA. So if permanent peace ...

... November 1993 the government published its Intelligence Services (Amendment) Bill. (2 ) By coincidence, no doubt, the 23 November was also the day chosen to show to the media the large, nicely packaged, photogenic collection of guns and explosives found on board a Polish ship in Cleveland. And these were arms not bound for the IRA, but for the Protestant, Ulster Defence Association. And it had all apparently been nipped in the bud by co-operation between MI5, MI6 and the Polish intelligence service. Noses began to twitch all over Europe (but not in the British media which reported it all, straight-faced, as requested). It was ...